The business world used to be led mainly by the men, but times are changing and the ladies have upped their game and worked their way to the top. Now, they’re innovating and changing the tides as they advance through the business world with a goal to improve and establish themselves, plus their dedication and passion as their driving force. Even in this dog-eat-dog world, these women will stop at nothing in performing to the best of their abilities and helping others to establish themselves by providing as much support as they can.

Here is our list of 20 women entrepreneurs to watch out for that’s gearing up to change the world in 2018.

Jules Schroeder

Age is not a factor  when it comes to starting a business and making money. Jules is a testament of that as she had started her career as an entrepreneur all the way back when she was 18, providing services to help others with their businesses. Delving in different kinds of marketing platforms, from consultation services, wholesale and publishing, at the age of 22 she had established her first 7-figure company (If that’s not amazing, then what is?!). She established Unconventional Life, a media platform and experience company that creates transformational live events through international business accelerator courses. Her podcast for Unconventional Life was also ranked number one podcast for entrepreneurs in 2017. Jules is now driven to create a movement that empowers the youth to be independent and to learn from the best in order to profit from what they’re passionate about.

Carrie Green

Women empowerment starts with oneself. Carrie empowered herself by teaching herself about internet marketing and entrepreneurship by jumping right in the middle of it when she was in college. Driven by the need to be financially independent and to be able to provide enough to pay off her student loans, she began with a phone unlocking service. She had no knowledge of it prior to getting into it but learned by asking experts who did and long hours of research. She started from scratch and build her own website, got herself a Google Adwords account and a credit card and from there, her business took off. With much trial and error, studying to improve her skills and a lot of A/B testing, Carrie managed to get her service to run itself. Now, she is the founder of the Female Entrepreneur Association, providing masterclasses to help others on how to start and grow their businesses through Social Media. She also created a free magazine called, “This Girl Means Business” that contains success stories to inspire others and how-tos for growing your business.

Amy Chang

Have you ever tried compiling a list of your family and friend’s information, like say their number or their birthdays and kept them up-to-date? It’s not a big group and yet it’s not exactly an easy task. Amy Chang, however, took that data gathering to an entirely new level. Starting her own startup business called Accompany, a relationship intelligence platform company that provides in-depth information on business contacts, company research and the latest news. This is the second largest database of people right behind LinkedIn. If that’s not amazing enough for you, this Engineering graduate from Stanford, used to be the Global Head of Product for Google Ads measurement and Reporting. Even before her career in Google Inc. she was also a part of product management and strategy positions at eBay and this is all just to name a few of what she has accomplished.

Amanda Signorelli

There’s always that notion that luck is much like fate or destiny, an abstract form of belief wherein you leave everything in the hands of the unknown force of the universe; but what if you could make your own luck and get yourself right on the path towards success? Amanda Signorelli did just that. Pushed and driven, she had placed her entire hopes and dreams into one business university and with much eagerness, sent email after email to get an update on her status. Though it seemed like life was against her, she managed to get a scholarship. She’s come a long way and now she’s the CEO of Techweek. She spearheads this multi-day conference held in different cities. They bring together different tech startups to network and learn from each other, building their foundation on a theory that success is contagious. Her main focus being diversity, she brings different people and businesses together and changing the world to make it a better place, one business at a time.

Christina Sass

Christina believes that brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity is not, taking that belief she transformed it into a startup company called Andela. The main goal of Andela is to tap into the large pool of tech talent in Africa and bridge the gap between the US and African Tech sectors. CNN has labeled Andela as the startup that’s much more difficult to get into than harvard. This company takes the otp 1% of developers and partners them with engineering teams of different businesses. The main goal of Andela is to help developers find their path of success by improving their skills so they could either start their own company, take a senior role at another tech company or to work for Andela itself.

Shardha Agarwal

Every second counts in the medicine world and often knowledge or information that doesn’t get to a person in time, could mean life or death. Shardha Agarwal, founder of Outcome Health, created her business to get that information and knowledge instantly to people. Her media company created an amazing solution to bridge the gap between patients and their doctors. They created a huge platform for actionable health intelligence. To get a better idea, they provide information through different mediums such as digital waiting room screens that educate caregivers and patients on how to take care of their health, digital exam room tablet in consultation rooms that provides their provider with personalized information before they speak and the like. This startup started from a small idea, manaul gathering of data in order to address their targeted customers by going door to door and calling up doctors to figure out what they needed to do and how. Now, Outcome Health reaches and provides information to over 230,000 health care professionals, 42,000 unique offices, reaches 585 patient visits annually and 145,000 touch points nationwide! That’s a huge following and that’s a huge help in the medicine field! Pretty amazing right?

Virginia Salas Kastilio

Snapchat has slowly started creeping up alongside Facebook and Twitter when it come to marketing and the 27 year old Snapchat Influencer, utilized the platform quite well. She started off just by documenting her life, letting people into her personal life by posting story after story on Snapchat about her day (that takes a lot of guts!). Her followers grew and her influence grew as people found her relatable. Reaching and inspiring tons of people, Salas Kastilio soon found herself the CEO of Gini.TV, run by influencers that helps businesses build influence and online awareness through social media. This young lady has a lot ahead of her, with how determined she is and headstrong, this challenge lover will brave through any storm that the business world can ever come up with.

Carolyn Rodz

The main driving force for Carolyn when she established Circuit Board (now known as Hello Alice), was to help female entrepreneurs and guide them and help them in changing the world. She empowers other aspiring female businesswomen to go for it and take charge. Circuit Board provides programs that include mentorship and provides capital and then connects them to resources that they need. Now, Circuit Board is called Hello Alice, a brainchild of Carolyn. Alice is a virtual accelerator that connects thousand of entrepreneurs worldwide.

Ahn Nguyen

The app development scene is huge now, thanks to the growing population of people focused on their phone. With the way technology is going, you don’t even need a computer anymore to be up-to-date or online. Apps help make things easier for everyone and the market for it had grown. Ahn Nguyen has seen the great potential for this and with her experience of more than 10 years of leading business development and product organizations in high growth startup environment, she co-founded Gummicube. Their company created a software called DATACUBE that provides marketers and app developers’ big data analytics capabilities for global app stores.

Anna Auerbach

Taking up the challenge of change in society, Anna Auerbach co-founded Werk. With the belief that a flexible work schedule will keep more people working and keep them more ambitious, she established her business, a marketplace of top jobs with pre-negotiated flexibility. It’s a huge dream for not just them but for sure, majority of the people who strive to keep their work-life balance in check. This website offers people career opportunities and have them pursue their careers and lives with equal commitment.

Esosa Ighodaro

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just take a photo of your #OOTD and make some money from it as you flaunt that rad style? Well, now that’s possible with the app CoSign. The creator, Esosa is innovating the entire online shopping experience with her social shopping mobile and web monetization tool, CoSign. Wanting to be able to be a problem solver and to be able to provide information to those who are looking for information. The drive she had for CoSign was to be able to make information easily available for people when it comes to clothes. With her innovation of online shopping, she connects people’s favorite brands and retailers with one tap. The app allows products in photos ready-to-buy. No need for searching with vague descriptions if you’re unable to find the brand that you want. CoSign turns your followers into customers.

Lana Hopkins

Finding the perfect purse can be a nightmare. There will never be a style that is exactly what you want. It would take a lot of time and effort to find the perfect bag ever that will fit your style and every, or most of your clothing combos. This was Lana’s problem. Inspired by the build-a-bear franchise, she thought why not use the same concept but for bags? With a lot of effort and research to find the best place to get raw material and the best artisans to make bags, Lana established her own online shop called Mon Purse in 2014. From a tiny personal problem, she has established a reputable global brand where customers have over 10 billion design combinations to pick from to create the perfect handbag for themselves.

Kayla Sanders

Managing and auditing is never an easy task, most especially when it comes to insurance businesses, keeping track of everything in an organized manner without the need of multiple papers and folders, and to easily keep track of everything, Kayla Sanders established Remy in 2016 as a solution for this, their secure, HIPAA-compliant technology makes business-to-business data integration simple. Already acclaimed as one of the hottest startups by Business Insider, she continues to streamline antiquated processes through her cloud-based compliance platform. This platform reinvents the insurers’ relationship with regulators and empowers insurance companies to effectively and efficiently manage their compliance process.

Rakia Reynolds

There’s a quote by the number 2 seed of tennis, Roger Federer, that goes, “If you’re good at something, make it everything.” Rakia Reynolds did achieve just that. A visual story teller ever since she was a kid, using video as her main tool of trade. She is now she’s a publicist and President of Skai Blue Media. She established the multimedia company way back in 2008. They specialize in helping businesses grow by generating press opportunities and publications. They mix traditional and non-traditional ways of promoting your business, focusing on telling the story of the business to capture people’s attention.

Leila Janah

Poverty is a problem in a lot of places and trying to overcome this and change the world to make it better is a huge undertaking, you might as well be called a hero! Leila is one (in my opinion). In 2008, Leila Janah established the Sama Group (“sama” means equality in sanskrit). A non-profit organization with one goal, to seek to improves the lives of those living below the poverty line, in short, to end global poverty. There are three different efforts, Samasource, which aids in connecting people in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to digital jobs; Samaschool, that makes an effort to train people in digital skills and there’s Samahope, a crowdfunding platform to fund medical treatments. These three social enterprises helped cultivate a new industry, impact sourcing.

Peta Kelly

You always hear the term “millennial” and it comes with both a negative and positive connotation. Often seen as people who expect more than they deserve or being extremely laid back and thinking that they have the world in the palm of their hands (which most of than not, they don’t). Millennials belong on opposite ends of the scale, either super successful and motivated to not having any of it at all, expecting to have things laid before them on a silver platter. For those that are either too lazy to scared to venture into the world, it’s best to leave them in the hands of the Millennial Motivation Machine with a PhD, Peta Kelly. Her expertise lies with delivering business acceleration programs and workshops that will help mould the young minds and business owners to successfully take the leap into entrepreneurship.

Lynan Sparsetein

A digital nomad, Lynan is a traveler. Exploring and seeing the world and at the same time sharing her online marketing wisdom with various international and tourism businesses. She assists in amplifying their global presence and to close more bookings. She puts these businesses the map with her company “The Experience Experts”. If you’re in the travel business, best to learn from her and see how she helps others through proper planning of websites and advertising through social media.

Stephanie Lampkin

Eliminating bias, race, ethnicity, physical appearance is a good way to be able to hire people based on skill and talent only. You see how well it works when you watch The Voice wherein singers are only judged on what the judges hear and nothing on how they appear on stage. In comparison, if The Voice gets great artists on their stage, then workplaces will get talented individuals in their work force. This idea was something Stephanie Lampkin worked on, creating the software called Blendoor in 2015. Blendoor is a software on merit-based matching, wherein it only provides an applicant's skills, work history and education and matches them to jobs that fit their merits. Recruiters at big tech firms like Google and Facebook, Twitter and Airbnb use this app for their hiring process.

Kathryn Finney

“Go Big or Go Home”, the mantra of Digitalundivided (established in 2012). They built 52 companies, raised $25 million in investment and reached 2000 founders, there’s no doubt that they’ve achieved their mantra. Kathryn Finney spearheaded this social enterprise that focused on economic empowerment of women and women of color through tech entrepreneurship. DID helps multiple startups from various high potential Black and Latinx founders through the startup pipeline; from the beginning of the funnel to the innovation of the ecosystem.

Natalia Oberti Noguera

“The Coach” as she’s called by Marie Claire, Natalia is the Founder and CEO of Pipeline Angels, she tries to change the world by helping women and non-binary entrepreneurs with training and workshops and investment opportunities. Going against the double standards set in society, she strives to create an army of angel investors that will help change the world through fellowship programs that will train women philanthropists for investing in women-led, for-profit socially rooted startups.

There we have it! The twenty wonderful ladies that are making a huge name for themselves and dominating the business world and inspiring empowerment and change to not just women, but to the entire world.

Reading success stories of other people can be inspiring and it can help in driving us towards a certain goal wherein we find the courage in ourselves to start our own business. However, as we keep reading up on their stories it seems much like that of a fairy tale. All these are shortened versions of all the trial and error, the sweat and tears that they’ve experienced to get where they are today. It takes more than just hard work and determination to establish yourself in a huge business world. Building a business is no joke and there’s no yellow brick road there to take you to Oz or there’s no rainbow that will guide you all the way to the pot of gold at the other end. It’s a steep learning curve and you’re bound to make mistakes, stumble over or find yourself stuck in a hole that you’ve found out that you dug yourself into. These ladies worked their asses off to get where they are and they dedicated their lives to it.

If anything, a good takeaway from this is that they just proved that it is possible and that everything just really starts with an idea or even a problem that you want solving and then taking the next step forward that will make the idea come into fruition or finding a solution to that problem and scaling it up.

So, is anyone on your list that wasn’t mentioned? Join the discussion and tell me why they’re on your list!